Understanding spoken or written words in a foreign language is an ancient problem. Whether in a professional, academic, or social setting, the inability to understand a language impedes progress and forecloses relationships.
Current solutions to this problem can be slow, expensive, and ineffective. Mastering a language may take years of study, represents a huge investment, and therefore may not be a practical solution. Another possibility is to manually look up the translations of individual words or phrases. This can be clumsy at best and inaccurate at worst. Resources are required, perhaps a phrasebook or access to an online dictionary. Such an approach is slow and tedious, as well as being mistake prone. Moreover, this approach may require some background knowledge on the part of the user. A word-for-word translation of a passage may not be meaningful without some knowledge of the foreign grammar. In addition, a lookup process may not be possible if the alphabet is foreign, as in the case of the Cyrillic alphabet, or if the language is character based, as in the case of Japanese. Machine-based solutions have been proposed but they tend to be crude and inaccurate, in part because of the well known difficulties of automating natural language processing.
In short, translating a foreign language may be costly while being potentially inaccurate. The required expenditure in time and effort may be significant, and the results returned may not be reliable. This disparity is even greater when the passage to be translated is a brief passage. Significant work may be required to translate even a single paragraph or sentence.
In the drawings, the leftmost digit(s) of a reference number identifies the drawing in which the reference number first appears.